You certainly don't have to worry about light freighters converting cargo space to other uses here. Most of them have laughably insufficient cargo capacities as is. In fact, most carry considerably less than the Lambda shuttle, which is just plain weird.

3 hours ago, Magnus Arcanus said:

OK Aetrion, this will come off as a bit rude, because the truth sometimes does that, but really the vast majority of your posts are complaining about just how terrible this game system is. If you dislike it so much, why do you use it? There are plenty of other RPG systems that can handle Star Wars just fine.

I don't dislike the system at all. If I disliked the system I wouldn't have any cause to complain about the parts of it that could be better, I just wouldn't use it. I'm so confused by this notion people seem to have that if you have the slightest criticism of something that means you hate it. That's an insane way to look at the world, that everything has to either be perfect or complete garbage. I love this system enough to actually come to a forum and spend hours writing about the weaknesses of it in the hopes that some of my feedback filters through into future improvements. There is no reward for typing this stuff, there is no guarantee anyone will read it, it's just the one thing you can do to try and plant a seed for better systems you might not see until a decade later.

Hey, maybe you don't care about posts that complain about things, but feedback does matter, even if it's negative. There is a lot of stuff in this system that could be better. The hardpoint system is one of those things. Defense rating is another. Some force powers are poorly written because they were conceived for a time where people only had two force dice. Some weapon abilities are way too easy to exploit. There are half a dozen different knowledge skills but only one single skill to craft, repair, modify or sabotage every single item in the universe. This system has flaws.

I mean, I don't know if developers are reading these forums, I don't know if the developers of other games are reading this forum. I know that when I'm involved in making things I try to read as much feedback as possible, and the most useful is always people who take the time to explain why they are unhappy, and the least useful is people telling them to just shut up and leave.

-

Speaking of feedback, this new forum has some kinks... If you type a reply on page 1 and the thread has two pages the submit button just keeps submitting without showing you that your post is already there. It should jump you to the end of the thread and show your finished post.

More kinky is that they upgraded to a new forum software which still has not basic functionality like automatic merge of double posts, something which has been standard since 15 years or so in professional forums like vbulletin.

But that technical is off topic, so lets not discuss this here.

Quote

It just bothers me that things that by all rights should just be furniture take hardpoints.

Here's the thing though: They're not just furniture.

Think of it like a house. There is only so much wiring you can fit into the walls of a private home.

It's like putting a super computer into your living room and expecting it to work with the standard electricity volume provided by your local utility service. Not to mention the specialised cableling infrastructre required.

The Holonet Array is the single most advanced comm device in Star Wars, capable of intergalactic encrypted sub-space [insert more technobabble words here] communication. I'd figure it takes a bit more than putting it in the corner and plugging it into the wall.

A Command Center on the other hand has to have access to every nook and cranny of the system it is applied to, preferably with override capabilities, fail saves, backup power, and redundancies upon redundancies.

1 hour ago, RicoD said:

Here's the thing though: They're not just furniture.

Think of it like a house. There is only so much wiring you can fit into the walls of a private home.

It's like putting a super computer into your living room and expecting it to work with the standard electricity volume provided by your local utility service. Not to mention the specialised cableling infrastructre required.

The Holonet Array is the single most advanced comm device in Star Wars, capable of intergalactic encrypted sub-space [insert more technobabble words here] communication. I'd figure it takes a bit more than putting it in the corner and plugging it into the wall.

A Command Center on the other hand has to have access to every nook and cranny of the system it is applied to, preferably with override capabilities, fail saves, backup power, and redundancies upon redundancies.

You might as well need to change the infrastructure of your street/city, as you need a new fiber internet high speed connection and the avaible power line to the house might be insufficient as well for the energy hunger of supercomputer, required cooling and ups
It gets complicated.

7 hours ago, Tom Cruise said:

At the same time, it tries to avoid the mistakes of Star Wars RPGs of the past, which allowed you to convert cargo space to space for ship upgrades and had it end up a complete mess of freighters turning into terrifying war machines.

I think you're looking for the kind of granularity the system explicitly tries to avoid, honestly. But it's also the kind of thing that GM fiat can and should allow for. If my players asked if they could pay to get some of their cargo space turned into a command centre, I'd probably be cool with that. But the more you bake this stuff into the rules the more complex it gets, and it's already a 443 page book.

Placing limits, and scaling costs/requirements by silhouette can easily remedy imbalance when converting cargo space to usable HP. In fact, it's easier to balance things, using well thought out house rules, in FFG's system than trying to fix what was wrong in d20 Saga.

I can reluctantly agree that the core book is already big enough as is, but Special Modifications should have included considerably more rules for ship customization than it did. That book is certainly not too thick, and if a choice must be made between a page of full-color art and a page of crunch, I'll take crunch every single time. I buy the books for rules. I can get art from the Web, and for free at that.

Disagree on that this stuff should have been in sm, sm is a technician splatbook, not an engineering splatbook. But I would really annoyed if we don't get the starship crafting rules in the upcoming engineer book.

I won't rationalize the system as so many have before me. You either agree with what they are saying or you do not. I get the feeling that much thought goes into the design of this game. Both in how it integrates with the current game system but also it can avoid some of the pitfalls of previous systems. They also have designed the game to be adaptable for individual games. So if you feel the need to make changes then do so. But I fail to see how this is a failing of the game.

I could see an argument for certain modifications allowing use of either x HP or x Encumbrance. (ie those that are basically rooms with a certain amount of hardware to run it) Allowing conversion of encumbrance to HP would get unbalancing stupidly fast.

Would seem a reasonable house rule, anyway.

1 minute ago, Darzil said:

I could see an argument for certain modifications allowing use of either x HP or x Encumbrance. (ie those that are basically rooms with a certain amount of hardware to run it) Allowing conversion of encumbrance to HP would get unbalancing stupidly fast.

Would seem a reasonable house rule, anyway.

Using space for whatever you like is already allowed in the current system. You can decorate your ship however you want.

It's a failing of the game when the rules

4 minutes ago, mouthymerc said:

I won't rationalize the system as so many have before me. You either agree with what they are saying or you do not. I get the feeling that much thought goes into the design of this game. Both in how it integrates with the current game system but also it can avoid some of the pitfalls of previous systems. They also have designed the game to be adaptable for individual games. So if you feel the need to make changes then do so. But I fail to see how this is a failing of the game.

It's a failing of the game if the RAW works okay when applied to Silhouette 4 or less, and breaks down rapidly if one tries to apply it to larger ships. Perhaps "much thought" was given to the rules, but only to a point. The designers don't seem to have considered players owning/using vessels larger than Silhouette 4, or fully thought through the consequences of the RAW when applied to frigate and cruiser-sized vessels.

I will say that, in contrast to d20 Saga, the devs did create Mass Combat rules to streamline/simplify handling large ground and space battles, and this is a great improvement. But the FFG system insofar as fixing what was wrong with d20 Saga's starship construction rules doesn't seem to me to have done all that much. Sure, FFG's system is less complicated. But it also still has many of the same flaws, and introduced some new ones.

13 minutes ago, Darzil said:

Allowing conversion of encumbrance to HP would get unbalancing stupidly fast.

There are house rules available on the Web here that seem to be balanced. When I ran into the need to modify capital ships beyond what the FFG RAW permits, it took me a bit of Googling before I found something that appears workable.

7 minutes ago, ShadoWarrior said:

There are house rules available on the Web here that seem to be balanced. When I ran into the need to modify capital ships beyond what the FFG RAW permits, it took me a bit of Googling before I found something that appears workable.

Considering that the 3 other rules suggestions from that website utterly broke the space combat system … I question the validity of your claim that these house rules seem balanced … especially as one of those three was the encumbrance conversion . ;-)

10 minutes ago, SEApocalypse said:

Considering that the 3 other rules suggestions from that website utterly broke the space combat system … I question the validity of your claim that these house rules seem balanced … especially as one of those three was the encumbrance conversion . ;-)

Have you actually tried using the first encumbrance conversion system, with caps? Rather than just look at it and scoff? Because I have.

3 hours ago, RicoD said:

Here's the thing though: They're not just furniture.

Think of it like a house. There is only so much wiring you can fit into the walls of a private home.

It's like putting a super computer into your living room and expecting it to work with the standard electricity volume provided by your local utility service. Not to mention the specialised cableling infrastructre required.

The Holonet Array is the single most advanced comm device in Star Wars, capable of intergalactic encrypted sub-space [insert more technobabble words here] communication. I'd figure it takes a bit more than putting it in the corner and plugging it into the wall.

A Command Center on the other hand has to have access to every nook and cranny of the system it is applied to, preferably with override capabilities, fail saves, backup power, and redundancies upon redundancies.

Weird that there is actually a fully autonomous version of the holonet relay you can just plop down on a planet you're colonizing then in Far Horizons.

And the command center is the same kind of thing the Rebels kept in an ancient massassi temple and an ice cave. Do ice caves have hardpoints?

20 minutes ago, ShadoWarrior said:

Have you actually tried using the first encumbrance conversion system, with caps? Rather than just look at it and scoff? Because I have.

So, you have already encountered modified GR/75s converted into ships which can destroy imperial class star destroyers in a single turn.

edit: And I am basically ignoring the fact that encumbrance rating on capitals does not even represent cargo space, but storage space for the crew, while the author of this conversion chart is puzzled by the low encumbrance rates on some ships, while the rules go on detail about his in one of the many grey boxes in the edge core book.

" Another issue concerns starships of Silhouette 4 through 6 with very low encumbrance capacity, for whatever reason. " - https://jegergryte.wordpress.com/category/ffg-star-wars-rpg/starships-edge-of-the-empire/

4 minutes ago, Aetrion said:

Weird that there is actually a fully autonomous version of the holonet relay you can just plop down on a planet you're colonizing then in Far Horizons.

And the command center is the same kind of thing the Rebels kept in an ancient massassi temple and an ice cave. Do ice caves have hardpoints?

Actually, rebels shows us that fusion generators have, while the actual deflector core is just an attachment to them. Reasonable to assume that a lot of other rebel equipment uses as well hardpoints on power generators ;-)

9 minutes ago, Aetrion said:

Weird that there is actually a fully autonomous version of the holonet relay you can just plop down on a planet you're colonizing then in Far Horizons.

And the command center is the same kind of thing the Rebels kept in an ancient massassi temple and an ice cave. Do ice caves have hardpoints?

Bases don't need to fly, although they did have some upgrades...

13 minutes ago, Aetrion said:

Weird that there is actually a fully autonomous version of the holonet relay you can just plop down on a planet you're colonizing then in Far Horizons.

That may or may not be because it's a different item altogether, made to be autonamous. Arguably much larger than what can reasonably installed in a space ship.

13 minutes ago, Aetrion said:

And the command center is the same kind of thing the Rebels kept in an ancient massassi temple and an ice cave. Do ice caves have hardpoints?

Because those have not been heavily retrofitted to accommodate equipment that require large amounts of power and data-infrastructures...

8 minutes ago, SEApocalypse said:

So, you have already encountered modified GR/75s converted into ships which can destroy imperial class star destroyers in a single turn.

Sure, that's what happened in d20 Saga under their starship mod rules. But in FFG, using the house rules on that page I linked to, with a hard cap at no more than 5 HPs when converting space on a GR-75 it's no longer possible to blow frigates to dust, let alone cruisers or battleships. You can't even face down purpose-built warships of your own size (like Marauder corvettes), which is as it should be. Also, under d20 the GR-75 had 19k of cargo space. In FFG it has 1k. Vast difference.

I actually don't like the idea of freely converting encumbrance to hardpoints, because the hardpoint system works perfectly well for representing hull modifications. If it comes to things like adding more armor to the ship, or upgrading the engines there is no reason why you should be able to remove cargo space to do those things.

The flaw in the hardpoint system isn't that you can't just fart more hardpoints into existence, but that the exact same resource is used for making modifications that actually affect the ships stats, and modifications that are just on-board facilities.

Like my opening post states, there is a very simple test for whether or not a system should take hardpoints: Would that system still be usable if it was attached to a Jawa Crawler that's parked in my hangar bay? If the answer is yes then it's stupid that that system takes hardpoints.

5 minutes ago, RicoD said:

That may or may not be because it's a different item altogether, made to be autonamous. Arguably much larger than what can reasonably installed in a space ship.

Nope, it's encumbrance 15, and the Armos is actually from the same book and specifically in there as a ship that is used for carrying whole pre-fabricated buildings to new colonies.

Just now, Aetrion said:

Nope, in fact the Armos is from the same book and specifically meant to haul items like that.

Exactly.

Haul. Not operate.